Laura Banella
Fabiano Assistant Professor of Italian
- Office Hours
- On research leave Fall Semester 2026
- Office
- 358 Decio Faculty Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556 - Phone
- 574-631-6720
- lbanella@nd.edu
Education
• PhD in Romance Studies, Duke University
• PhD in Italian Literature, University of Padua
• M.A. in Humanities, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa
• M.A. in Italian Literature, University of Pisa
• B.A. in Humanities, University of Pisa
Biography
Laura Banella is an assistant professor in Italian. Her research interests lie in medieval Italian literature. Her research has focused on Dante and Boccaccio and on the ways in which the books transmitting their works construct 'authority' and 'canonicity' (13th-16th c.). She has also worked on reception, the history of literary criticism, Renaissance literature, and the female auctor.
Her current research project explores the physical act of copying, editing, and printing Dante’s lyric poetry from the late 13th to the early 16th century in Italy through the study of multi-text and multi-author volumes, both manuscripts and early printed editions. Through the privileged case study of Dante's lyric poems and Vita nova, her work explores specific kinds of cultural authority, and how poetic authority and literary canons were formed through collective processes during the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. It investigates the ways in which ‘national poets’ are born through editing and rewriting, and how major authors influence cultural development as functions of discourse.
Professor Banella is a Research Fellow of the University of Oxford, and co-coordinates the premodern section of the international research project Rethinking Lyric Communities.
Before coming to Notre Dame, she pursued her postdoctoral research and taught in Italy (University of Padua, University of Milan) and the UK (University of Oxford).
Research Interests
Medieval Italian Literature; Dante and Boccaccio; lyric poetry; manuscript studies and history of the book; Renaissance literature.
Representative Publications
Research monographs
Rime e libri delle rime di Dante tra Medioevo e primo Rinascimento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2020).
La ‘Vita nuova’ del Boccaccio. Fortuna e tradizione (Rome-Padua: Antenore, 2017).
Co-Edited volumes
Oltre la ‘Commedia’. ‘L’altro Dante’ e il canone antico della lirica (1450-1600), eds. Laura Banella and Franco Tomasi (Rome: Carocci, 2020).
Critical editions
Sicco Polenton, Vite dei moderni. Dante, Mussato, Petrarca, Boccaccio, ed., trans. and comm. by Laura Banella and Rino Modonutti (Padua: CLEUP, 2020).
Selected Articles and Essays
“Between Books and Friends: Dante’s Real and Ideal Lyric Communities.” Italian Studies 80.2 (2025), in print.
“Dante in Prison: Copying, Illustrating, and Writing Lyric Poetry in Venice in 1400.” Dante Studies 141 (2023): 3-38.
“A New Spanish Translation of the Commedia and Dante’s Renaissance Readers (1491-1550 ca),” Bibliotheca Dantesca. Journal of Dante Studies 5 (2022): Article 2 https://repository.upenn.edu/
“Scrittura letteraria ed ermeneutica: le Rime di Dante negli anni ’30 del Novecento,” Critica letteraria 49/192-193 (2021): 1063-82.
“Fiammetta and Héloïse: Boccaccio’s Female Auctor and Women Intellectuals,” Mediaevalia 42 (2021): 227-267.
“The Lyric Dante in the Twentieth Century: Hermeneutics and Editorial Forms.” Italian Studies 75/3 (2020): 307-325.
“Autorità volgare e creazione del canone tra Aï faus ris e il De vulgari eloquentia,” Medioevo Letterario d’Italia 16 (2019): 21-44.
“Dioneo lettore di Dante: la tenzone con Forese, le ‘malmaritate’ e l’etica della letteratura.” In Intorno a Boccaccio/Boccaccio e dintorni: atti del Seminario internazionale di studi (Certaldo Alta, Casa di Giovanni Boccaccio, 6-7 settembre 2018) (Florence: Firenze UP, 2019), 59-76.
“Boccaccio’s Anthologies and the Dawn of Editorial Auctoritas.” Mediaevalia 39 (2018) [special issue Authority and Materiality in the Italian Songbook: From the Medieval Lyric to the Early-Modern Madrigal, O. Holmes, P. Schleuse, eds.]: 273-96.
“Dante, la nascita dell’Italia e della letteratura italiana: il racconto delle origini nelle storie della letteratura risorgimentali.” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 194 n° 647 (2017): 321-59.
“The ‘Dante Canon’: Collecting Dante’s Lyric Poetry in the Fourteenth Century.” Dante Studies 134 (2016): 169-94.
“«In persona d’alcuno passionato»: il ‘ritratto d’autore’ nei manoscritti del Filostrato.” Studi sul Boccaccio 41 (2013): 129-54.
“La scrittura di Benvenuto Cellini: tra pluristilismo, espressivismo e realismo.” Filologia e critica 37 (2012): 169-211.
“Su alcuni manoscritti illustrati del Filostrato.” Studi sul Boccaccio 39 (2011): 315-66